Quite a few of the submissions this week talk about how history and culture are both used and confused in games. For instance, Corey Milne uses the recent news about Greece’s pleas to have their artifacts returned to them rather than loaned out by the British Museum to draw parallels to the Uncharted series. Milne argues that Nathan Drake is nothing like Indiana Jones, but is more accurately a thief with no respect for other cultures.

So technically this is more about child development than game development, but bear with me, as this week Andy Baio details his experiment in child rearing in which he had his son play through video games in chronological order beginning with the Atari 2600 to see whether (and how) it would alter his son’s perception of contemporary games.

Serving up a “Worst of” list rather than a “Best of” list, Jed Pressgrove dishes up an analysis of the ten worst games of 2014 whose “insidious” marketing ploys are hidden beneath technical and artistic completeness.

At Play/Paws. Melody conducts a close-reading of Transistor’s themes (including elitism, surveillance, censorship, and virtuality) in this three-part series.

Final Mentions:

As always, we’re grateful for our readers and those who have submitted works. If you see something you think we should feature, don’t forget to submit it to us via a Twitter mention or through email. Keep in mind if you are submitting something for This Year in Video Game blogging, you must submit by email!

Also, in case you missed it: StoryBundle has brought back the very first videogame bundle, which includes Ralph Baer’s Videogames: In the Beginning and Brendan Keogh’s Killing is Harmless.

Feeling in the writing mood yourself? Consider participating in this month’s Blogs of the Round Table while there’s still time!

Finally, we’re thankful for the support of your readers. We reached some important funding milestone recently, and we’ve got some great things planned for 2015, so if you aren’t already a supporter, please consider becoming one!